The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium that hosts open-source software projects, including the Linux kernel, and provides the governance, legal, and operational services that let competing companies build shared infrastructure together. It was formed in 2007 by the merger of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, and is funded chiefly through tiered corporate memberships from more than 1,000 member organizations.
Led by executive director Jim Zemlin, the foundation funds core Linux development, including Linus Torvalds' work as a Linux Foundation fellow, and houses a family of sub-foundations: the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (home of Kubernetes), the OpenJS Foundation (📝Node.js), the PyTorch Foundation, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), and LF AI & Data. On December 9, 2025, it formed the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF), a directed fund co-founded by 📝Anthropic, Block, and 📝OpenAI, with 📝Amazon Web Services (AWS), 📝Google, 📝Microsoft, 📝Cloudflare, and Bloomberg among its platinum members. Its founding projects are Anthropic's 📝Model Context Protocol (MCP), Block's goose agent framework, and OpenAI's 📝AGENTS.md convention, placing the leading agent-to-tool standard under the same neutral stewardship as Kubernetes and PyTorch. The foundation is also a launch partner in Anthropic's 📝Project Glasswing, which directed $2.5M to Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF through it.